In recent years there has been a renewed interest among the general public in geometrical puzzle toys. These toys generally comprise a solid object of some regular geometric shape such as a regular polyhedron. Portions of the solid object are usually rotatable in a few planes (such as three for a hexahedron or four for a tetrahedron), or translatable, so that the puzzle may be "solved"; i.e., surface features or surface indicia of the solid object may be brought into a predetermined relationship or juxtaposition.
The most popular of these puzzle toys is based on the simplest forms of regular polyhedra, such as the regular tetrahedron or hexahedron, with movement in a small number of planes. Although the solutions to such puzzles may initially appear to be incomprehensibly abstract, it has been shown that a few simple strategies, when correctly applied in reiterative fashion, will lead to a relatively quick solution to the puzzle with relatively little mental effort. Thus the essential attraction of a puzzle, the mental challenge to achieve a solution, is reduced in these prior art devices.